(NewsNation) — While Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says he wanted to restore public trust by firing the entire vaccine advisory panel at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one person he fired says Kennedy did the opposite in the academic community.
The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices members was made up of medical and health professionals who made recommendations on the safety and use of vaccines. One of the 17 panelists fired is Dr. Noel Brewer, who joined NewsNation’s “CUOMO” on Tuesday night.
“My concern is that we’ve taken 60 years of efforts to build trust among health care providers in the recommendations of the advisory committee through CDC, and that trust just evaporated overnight,” Brewer said. “It is going to be hard to get that back.”
The committee was set to meet in two weeks to discuss COVID-19 and other vaccines.
“I don’t think most Americans even care that much about it. And now that there’s all this news and people like me out from our ivory towers, it’s generating interest,” Brewer said. “But I don’t think that the impact here is going to be primarily among the general public.”
Dr. Robert Redfield was CDC director under the first Trump administration, and he said the public lost trust in the power of vaccines.
“I believe vaccines are the most important gift of science to modern medicine. When I was CDC director, I was very disturbed that over half of the population didn’t get the flu vaccine,” he said. “Then, the COVID pandemic came, and I have to say, although I have a lot of respect for Noel and the other people on the committee, the reality is the guidance that came out of the ACIP for COVID vaccines, I think in general, was ill-advised.”